by Mona Simpson
“They’re probably not even going to have room left at the hotel now,” she said to me.
The policeman had freckles on his arms and his hands, like my mother. He put the notebook in his back pocket. “Now, you are both welcome to stay with my wife and I for the night, if you’re worried. There’s plenty of extra room.”
“Oh, no, thank you, though, we couldn’t.”
“Because it wouldn’t be any trouble. And my wife makes a mean apple pie.” He looked at me.
“Thank you, but no, really.” My mother inspired offers like that, often. I didn’t know until I was older how unusual that is. “But would you mind dropping us off at the Luau?”
“Yes, ma’am,” he said. “Nice place.”
We both sat in the backseat while he drove. The windows were covered with chicken wire. “I just hope they still have room,” my mother said, stretching her fingers out on the seat and looking down at their nails.
The thing about my mother and me is that when we get along, we’re just the same. Exactly. And at the Luau Hotel, we were happy. Waiting for our car to be fixed, we didn’t talk about money. It was so big, we didn’t think about it. We lay on our stomachs on the king-sized bed, our calves tangling up behind us, reading novels. I read Gone With the Wind. Near the end, I locked myself in the bathroom, stopping up my face with a towel. After a while she knocked on the door.
“Honey, let me in, I want to tell you something!” I made myself keep absolutely still. “Don’t worry, Honey, she gets him back later. She gets him again in the end.”
We loved the swimming pool. Those days we were waiting for our car to be fixed, we lay out from ten until two, because my mother had read that those were the best tanning hours. That was what we liked doing, improving ourselves: lying sprawled out on the reclining chairs, rubbed with coconut suntan oil, turning the pages of new-bought magazines. Then we’d go in the pool, me cannonballing off the diving board for the shock of it, my mother starting in one corner of the shallow end, both her arms out to the sides, skimming the surface as she stepped in gradually, smiling wide, saying, “Eeeeeeeee.”
My mother wore a white suit, I swam in gym shorts. While I was lying on a chair, once, she picked up my foot and looked down my leg. “Apricot,” she said.
At home, one farmer put in a swimming pool, fenced all around with aluminum. That summer, Ben and I sat in the fields outside, watching through the diamond spaces of the fence. Sometimes the son would try and chase us away and throw rocks at us, little sissy pieces of gravel.
“Public property!” we screamed back at him. We were sitting in Guns Field. We kids all knew just who owned what land.
Every afternoon, late, after the prime tanning hours, we went out. Dressing took a long time. My mother called room service for a pitcher of fresh lemonade, told them not too much sugar, but some sugar, like yesterday, a pinch, just enough so it was sweet. Sweet, but a little tart, too. Come to think of it, yesterday tasted a little too tart, but the day before was perfect. This was all on the telephone. My mother was the kind of customer a waitress would like to kill.
We’d each take showers and wash our hair, squeezing lemons on it before the cream rinse. We touched up our fingernails and toenails with polish. That was only the beginning. Then came the body cream and face cream, our curlers and hair sprays and makeup.
All along, I had a feeling we couldn’t afford this and that it would be unimaginably bad when we had to pay. I don’t know what I envisioned: nothing, no luck, losing everything, so it was the absolute worst, no money for food, being stopped on a plain cement floor in the sun, unable to move, winding down, stopping like a clock stopped.
But then it went away again. In our sleeveless summer dresses and white patent leather thongs, we walked to the district of small, expensive shops. There was an exotic pet store we visited every day. We’d been first drawn in by a sign on the window for two defumed skunks.
“But you can never really get the smell completely out,” the blond man inside had told us. He showed us a baby raccoon and we watched it lick its paws, with movements like a cat but more delicate, intricate features.
More than anything, I wanted that raccoon. And my mother wasn’t saying no. We didn’t have to make any decisions until we left the Luau. And we didn’t know yet when that would be.
In a china store, my mother held up a plain white plate. “Look at this. See how fine it is?” If she hadn’t said that, I wouldn’t have noticed anything, but now I saw that it was thin and there was a pearliness, like a film of water, over the surface.
“Granny had a whole set like this.” She turned the plate upside down and read the fine printing. “Yup, this is it. Spode.”
I remembered Granny almost bald, carrying oats and water across the yard to feed Hal’s pony. But still, I didn’t know.
“Mmhmm. You don’t know, but Granny was very elegant. Gramma isn’t, she could be, but she isn’t. We’re like Granny. See, we belong here, Pooh-bear-cub. We come from this.”
I didn’t know.
A week after the accident, we had good news. The bill for our car was far less than we’d thought and my mother paid ninety dollars, off the record, to fix the other woman’s fender. They both agreed not to contact insurance companies.
This was all great except it meant we were leaving. The car would be ready in a day. My mother sat on the edge of the bed, filing her nails, when she put down the telephone receiver, gently. “There’s still a few things I’d like to see here,” she said.
We went out to the pool and tried not to think. It seemed easy, lying on towels over warm cement. I’d gotten tan, very dark, the week we’d been there. My mother had freckles and pink burns on her cheeks and shoulders, and her hair was streaked lighter from the sun. That day, my mother got up and went inside before I did. She had to be careful in the sun.
I was in the pool, holding on to the side, kicking my legs in the water behind me. I was worried about my knees. Lately, I’d noticed they were fat, not knobby and horselike, the way my mother’s were. So I was doing kicks to improve them. Around the pool, other women slouched in deck chairs. I thought about my knees again. At least tan fat looked better than white fat, I was thinking.
Then my mother called me. “We’re going to see a house,” she said, shoving a towel into my hand. “Hurry up and jump in the shower.”
We waited, clean and dressed, outside the Luau. My mother told me that a real estate agent named Gail was picking us up. There was something in her tone, she didn’t want to explain. So I went along with it as if it was nothing out of the ordinary. And there in Scottsdale, it really wasn’t. It had been so long since anything was regular.
Suddenly, Gail was there and she honked. I climbed into the backseat and my mother sat next to her in front. They talked quickly, getting to know each other. My mother said we were just moving, from Bay City, Wisconsin, and that she was looking forward to the warm air.
“I couldn’t stand another winter.” She rolled down her window and glanced outside. “I love Scottsdale, the dryness.”
Gail Letterfine was very tan with light gray hair, bright clothes and turquoise Indian jewelry. “You’re going to love this house, it’s absolutely cream of the crop. I haven’t had anything like this to show for over a year.”
She drove us to the top of a hill. The land was brown, dirt. There were no lawns. I just sat in the backseat, not saying anything. I wished I had Gone With the Wind. I knew I shouldn’t say anything, in case I contradicted my mother. I could tell she was lying, but I wasn’t sure. And I didn’t know why. She liked me to talk, around strangers, like a kid. But I was mad, sort of. So I just stared out the window.
Gail Letterfine parked the Mustang on the pebbled lot near a fountain. Pennies overlapped and glittered on the bottom. Just from where we were, I could tell this was something we’d never seen before. We didn’t have houses like this in Bay City. A maid opened the door, a woman I knew was a maid from her black short dress and white apron
. We’d never seen a maid before, in person, at least I hadn’t, I didn’t know anymore about my mother. When we got along, it seemed we knew everything about each other. But now, I felt like my mother glossed over things. She knew how nervous I could be.
The maid went to get someone else. Gail Letterfine opened a door and it was a closet. “Coat closet,” she said, loudly, as if it were her own house.
The living room was huge, with red clay tile floors and high ceilings. There were long windows on two walls and you could see outside, down the hill. There was no furniture except a black grand piano and chairs against the walls.
The woman of the house came to meet us. Considering where she lived, she looked like an ordinary person. She had plain brown permanented hair and a nice face. She was wearing a gray dress and stockings.
Gail Letterfine introduced her and the woman took us through her house. Out windows, we saw the backyard, brown and dry, with an oval turquoise swimming pool. Clay pots of strawberry plants stood with thick, heavy berries hanging down over their rims. Every time we entered a room, the woman stood in the doorway while Gail Letterfine pointed out features. In the kitchen, Gail opened every cupboard, where we saw canned soup and Jell-O mixes just like in my grandmother’s house. Gail went on about the sink, the refrigerator and the stove. Then she started in on the plumbing. From the way my mother shifted, you could tell she was less than interested.
“What about your appointments?” My mother cupped her hand around a painted Mexican candleholder on the kitchen table. “Are they for sale, too? Because they all go so well, they’re what make the house.”
I wondered where she’d learned that word. The woman shook her head. “No, I’m sorry.” My mother liked the woman who lived here, her quietness. There was something tough in Gail Letterfine. With her espadrille, she was now pointing to the molding around the kitchen floor. My mother would rather have talked to the woman in the gray dress. Perhaps that’s why we’d come here, because my mother missed her friends.
The bedrooms and bathrooms were regular-sized.
“Our daughter’s room,” the woman said, in the last doorway on the hall. “She’s gone off to college.”
My mother nudged me, “This would be yours.” We wandered into the adjoining bathroom, which had a vanity and a makeup mirror. Starfish and shells cluttered the tile rim of the sunken tub. My mother frowned at me, “Not bad.”
They walked back down the hallway to the dining room. The woman in the gray dress had, quietly, offered them tea, and my mother answered quick and loud, “I’d love some.”
I stayed in the room. Outside, water slapped the edges of the swimming pool. A light breeze was making waves. I sat on the hard single bed with stuffed animals bunched up by the pillow. Two pompons fluttered on the bulletin board.
I leaned back and imagined the girl away at college. I thought if I lived here, with this bed and this bulletin board, the regular desk and dresser, I would have this kind of life. Nothing to hide. The girl left her room and went to college and people could walk through and see it.
I actually breathed slower and believed my mother had changed her mind about California, that we were really going to live here, in this house.
It was nice lying on that bed, listening to the soft shuffle of water through the window screen. I felt like sleeping. Then a few minutes later, I woke up hungry. I got up and went down the hall. I was thinking of the woman in the gray dress. For some reason, I thought she would give me cookies and a glass of milk.
They were sitting around the dining room on beige chairs. My mother’s knees rested together and her calves slanted down, parallel, mirroring the woman’s across the room. My mother was sipping her tea, holding it a long time to her lips, appreciating it.
“Could we put in a bathhouse? I’d love a little cabana out there.”
Gail Letterfine lifted her silver glasses, which were attached and hooked behind her ears on a thin silver chain, and wrote down my mother’s questions in a hand-sized notebook.
“You’d need a permit.” She tapped the arm of her chair with a pen. “That’s not hard.”
“But I would like to know.”
“Who can I call? Let me see. Oh, I got it. Mangold.”
My mother floated up to where I was at the sliding glass doors. She rummaged her hand through my hair.
“But you like it,” Gail Letterfine said, slamming the notebook closed.
“Well, my husband’s coming in next week, and of course, he’ll have to see it, too.”
“Of course,” said the woman in the gray dress, nodding as if she understood perfectly.
“But I’m sure he’ll like it.” My mother nodded, too. “I think this is the one.” She lifted her eyes to the high corners of the room. “Mmhmm, I’m sure of it. What do you think, Ann?”
I was reeling, as if I’d just woken up to trouble, when she said her husband. The sentence went through me like a toy train, three times around the track and no time, coming in, could I picture it right. Ted sure wasn’t coming. Not after we’d used his credit card like we had.
“I’m hungry, Mom,” I said. I was disappointed by the woman in the gray dress, too. I felt like I’d been promised food and then not given it.
My mother ran her hand through my hair again. “Well, we better be off and get this little one something to eat.” She smiled. She liked it when I said bratty, kid things in front of other people. We both did. It made us feel normal. She liked people to think she spoiled me.
On the way back to town, Gail Letterfine drove us to see Frank Lloyd Wright’s work site in the desert, Taliesin West. I didn’t see what the big deal was. They were excavating. There were huge piles of dirt, like you saw at home where they were developing for the new highway, and dust around everywhere. It was so hot, the piece of thong between my toes stung the skin.
“I love the atmosphere,” my mother said, tilting her face up to the sun before naturally drifting indoors, to the air-conditioned gift shop. That was one thing about my mother, why she was fun; she valued comfort. We never had to stay in museums too long. If we didn’t like something, we left and went somewhere else, like a restaurant. She wasn’t too strict about discipline.
Metal bells of all sizes hung from the gift shop ceiling. “People come from all over the world to buy these bells,” Gail Letterfine said. “You’re lucky to get them at that price. They’re going to be collector’s items.”
My mother bought one, taking a long time to pick the size. “Won’t it look nice in the house?” She winked at me.
I scowled.
Gail took us out to a late lunch. We ate a lot, we each had desserts, extras. We acted the way we did at motel diners, not minding the prices, but this was an elegant restaurant, and expensive. They weren’t going to take our Mobil credit card. My mother argued primly when Gail tried to pay the bill and I kicked her, hard, under the table. That night, my mother made me watch while she rolled down her stockings and put her fingers on the bruises. She said she’d known all along Gail would insist. And Gail had, tearing the bottom strip off the bill. “It’s a write-off, you know,” she’d said. “No prob.”
She’d left us in front of the Luau.
“So tomorrow morning, I’ll bring a contract to breakfast. Just a work sheet. So we can start talking terms. Toot-a-loo,” Gail called, waving her plump hand as she drove away.
We watched her car go. All of a sudden it seemed sad, leaving Scottsdale. Suddenly, I really did like Gail.
“Well,” my mother shrugged. “We really don’t need dinner, that was plenty. Should we just walk around a little?”
We ambled down the streets slowly, because we were full from eating too much and because it was late afternoon and there was a light, warm breeze and because we were leaving tomorrow. My mother led me through an archway, to some shops on an inside courtyard. She found a perfume maker, a blind man, who blended custom fragrances. He showed us essences of oils, leaves, grasses and flowers.
“All natur
al,” he told us.
He kept the essences in small glass bottles lined up on glass shelves. I dawdled while he worked with my mother. He mixed drops of oils on a glass plate, then rubbed them on the inside of my mother’s arm with the tip of an eyedropper.
Finally, they got what they wanted. I had to laugh. The mixture was lily of the valley, wild penny rose, lilac and ordinary lawn grass.
“It’s like my childhood,” my mother said, holding out her arm. “What I grew up around. Smell.”
They decided to call it Joie d’Adele and my mother ordered a hundred and fifty dollars’ worth, eight little bottles, the smallest batch he made. She asked if he could mix them overnight, because we had to leave Scottsdale the next morning. He was an odd-looking man. His face hung large and white, creamy. He wore brown clothes and he moved slowly, with his head turned down. But he liked my mother, you could tell. Some people did. You could see it. Strangers almost always love my mother. And even if you hate her, can’t stand her, even if she’s ruining your life, there’s something about her, some romance, some power. She’s absolutely herself. No matter how hard you try, you’ll never get to her. And when she dies, the world will be flat, too simple, reasonable, too fair.
As soon as we got out of the store, we started fighting about the money.
“We can’t afford that,” I whined, turning on one foot to face her. “A hundred and fifty dollars! For perfume! Plus the car and the hotel!”
“Well, you should talk, how much do you think your raccoon is!”
We’d made our way, walking and yelling, to the pet store, where the baby raccoon hunched in the window, his paw stalled in a bowl of water.
“He’s a hundred and he eats! He’d eat up fifteen dollars a week in food, at least! The perfume would last, it would last me five years probably. I take care of things and they last. You see what I wear. I haven’t bought one new thing in years. But they were all good to start with.”